


Hallways and Highways

by robotsdance



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, MSR
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:53:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3168905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsdance/pseuds/robotsdance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Home is rapidly becoming this. These blurry spaces where they aren’t quite on a case yet but they aren’t back in D.C. either. They’re still them but with softer edges, drifting between quiet conversation and comfortable silence as they slide through time and space at highway speeds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hallways and Highways

It’s Wednesday evening and they had spent the entirety of their day in their office doing paperwork. Well, the day had started with Scully doing paperwork while Mulder flipped through old X-Files and ended with them respectfully but passionately disagreeing over the finer points of an X-File from 1978. 

Their discussion of old crime scene photos continues as they both put on their coats to go home for the night. They linger in the hall outside their office to talk about the third victim's scars and they come to a complete standstill in the parking garage somewhere between their cars to discuss the second victim's proximity to a barbershop until it occurs to them that soon their cars will be the only two left.

Their conversation doesn’t end so much as pause when they agree to put it on hold until tomorrow. They exchange simple goodnights and are on their way.

Mulder phones her that night and they pick up where they left off as she eats dinner.

——

Exactly nothing about their day has gone well. Mulder’s filter is far from perfect, but he usually has a decent sense as to what’s worth their time. The case Mulder had them on today wasn’t aliens, it wasn’t something paranormal and it wasn’t some grand conspiracy. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a crime. No, today their travel expenses had paid for them to track down a group of obnoxious college kids competing to see who could attract the most attention from law enforcement without technically committing a crime. They had succeeded with flying colours and Mulder was not taking it well.

Normally he would accept something like this with a bit more grace, but this is the third case in as many months that he had been optimistic would lead to some tangible information about his sister's disappearance and once again he’d chased hope out into some obscure town only to have it not to have existed at all. Scully’s attempts to bring him down gently had failed rather spectacularly. He is still angry at the group of bros he’d interviewed that afternoon, he is frustrated with her for being right that this case was a waste of their time and he is furious with himself for letting himself feel hope to begin with.

Watching Mulder storm down the hall of their motel towards his room, all barely controlled despair, feels personal. It feels paranoid to even consider that this was a targeted strike against Mulder disguised as a group of frat boys being jerks but targeted or not, there’s no doubt that everything about today functioned to dismantle Mulder with terrifying precision. Scully watches him disappear into his room like a ghost and hopes the people who’d like the X-Files shut down aren’t watching too closely. 

She needs to get him out of here. Their flight isn’t until tomorrow afternoon and she doesn’t want him to rattle around his motel room in his current state for any longer than strictly necessary. She’s tempted to shove him back in their rental car and just drive. 

20 minutes later she’s outside his door with her overnight bag, her mind made up.

She knocks on the door and he answers almost immediately. He’s taken his jacket off, but beyond that it looks like he’s been pacing since they went into their separate rooms. The TV is on, but she can tell he isn’t watching it.

“What?” he asks.

“We’re leaving,” she announces, “Get your stuff.”

If she was expecting resistance, she doesn’t get it. They’re checked out of their rooms and on the road in ten minutes flat. 

——

They’re driving away from another thing they will never talk about. Another trauma to discreetly file away with the others. Scully is barely more than a foot away from him but she may as well be in another dimension. She’s processing. He’s seen it enough times to know that she will talk when she is ready, and when she does it will be a conversation they have had far too many times already.

“Mulder?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we just not talk about what happened for a while?”

“Of course,” he’ll say. They won’t have talked about the traumatic event at all up to this point, not beyond the essential “are you okays” that they exchanged at the scene, and they probably never will. The case will be discussed as a case in the near future. Paperwork and expense reports and such. But the thing that has Scully quietly compartmentalizing will remain securely tucked away, addressed only in passing on official documents. 

This seems to work for Scully. He has seen her face impossible things and come in to work the next day like nothing happened. He has seen her suffer in ways he would not wish upon anyone, sit in silence in the car or the airport or the hospital with him and then barely mention it again. 

To a degree, he envies her ability to do this. He does not process trauma the way she does. Where she needs to be stationary for a little while, he needs to move. Trauma built him and raised him and now it chases him everywhere. He doesn’t remember what it feels like not to need to keep looking, to keep going. Whether he’s running into the darkness looking for answers or retreating full speed, he needs to be in motion. If he lingers the despair has time to settle on his skin and seep into his bones.

It has occurred to him before that the car is ideal place for both of them in the immediate aftermath of whatever has gotten under their skin. Mulder drives, giving him direct control of the momentum he craves, putting miles between them and the place where the darkness managed to overtake them. Beside him, Scully can be still and silent for as long as she needs to, lost in her own head until she emerges, ready to face whatever their destination brings.

Because Scully may need to hold still sometimes, but as soon as she’s done, she needs to be in motion almost as much as Mulder does. So Mulder drives on in silence, calculating the driving distance between here and home, between here and that diner she likes, between here and anywhere, all the while racking his brains for a case they can be working on tomorrow. Anything so that the moment Scully comes to him saying “Let’s go” they can hit the ground running together. 

——

Their flight is delayed at best and cancelled at worst. They’ve been at the airport for hours, and they’ve long since lost track of meaningful time. Scully is yawning with increasing frequency by Mulder’s shoulder, her eyes drifting closed before she shakes her head and looks around in an effort to stay conscious. 

“Get some sleep,” Mulder tells her, “If they announce anything I’ll let you know. And if they don’t I’ll start building us a hot air balloon or something.”

Scully doesn’t argue the point and doesn’t ask him to detail any previous hot air balloon building experience. Instead she just bunches up her coat beside Mulder and stretches across the row of empty chairs beside her. She’s fast asleep within minutes. 

——

The clock on the dashboard reminds her that she has officially missed that meeting with Skinner. She assumes he tried to call her at some point but her phone has been off since she shot Mulder. 

Without taking her eyes off the road she reaches over for Mulder’s wrist and finds his pulse. She checks the clock again as she estimates his heart rate. He’s stable. The sedatives she gave him will wear off a few hours after they arrive, which hopefully will be enough time for whatever they were giving him to have worked its way out of his system completely. He’ll wake up shot and dehydrated but alive and not guilty and today she will take what she can get. 

——

The lights of cars blur past them in the rain as the rhythmic swish and thump of the windshield wipers moving back and forth lulls them into contentment. Scully yawns and shifts in the passenger seat and he glances over and offers her his coat for a makeshift pillow. She accepts and he reaches into the back seat where he tossed it earlier and passes it to her. She balls it up and squishes it between the seat and the window and snuggles against it.

“Thank you,” she says softly.

“Don’t mention it,” he replies as he turns the radio down a few notches. She responds with a little noise that he knows means she’s still awake and listening but not for much longer.

Home is rapidly becoming this. These blurry spaces where they aren’t quite on a case yet but they aren’t back in D.C. either. They aren’t in the office or in neighbouring motel rooms. They’re still them but with softer edges, drifting between quiet conversation and comfortable silence as they slide through time and space at highway speeds.

He wonders sometimes, on these long stretches of highway under the stars, about the logistics of doing this forever. Just him and Scully looking into the unexplained together. Because he can’t imagine his life without this, and he knows he can’t do it alone anymore.

The moon is bright, the road is clear, and Scully is asleep beside him as they drive towards another case where nothing is what it seems.

There is nowhere in the world he would rather be.

——

“Scully, it’s me.” She knew it was him before she picked up the phone. No one else calls her this late at night. She also knows that whatever it is, it’s serious. There’s none of the enthusiasm she’s used to hearing in his voice when the gist of the phone call is ‘come see something weird with me’.

Sure enough, after a moment of silence the reason he called escapes him like a confession, like she alone can offer absolution, “Can you come get me?” 

“Where are you?” she asks, already reaching for clothes to quickly change into. 

There’s a long pause and she hears him inhale sharply, “Just, can you please come get me.”

“I’m already on my way to the car,” she says calmly, though she is already mentally reviewing his behaviour over the last couple of weeks, looking for anything even slightly out of the ordinary she may have overlooked, “Just tell me where you are.”

She finds him slumped against a phone booth exactly where he said he would be. She pulls over and runs to him. Initially she fears he is unconscious, but when she kneels down beside him he looks up at her. She checks his vitals and looks for any serious injuries while Mulder silently lets the inspection happen. 

He hasn’t been drinking and to his knowledge he’s not under the influence of mind altering substances. His clothes are a mess, but under the distant light of a single streetlight she can’t determine if it’s evidence of a struggle or evidence of something else. He’s not talking much yet, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off her since she arrived.

She helps him up and together they make their way back to the car.

——

They pull over at a lonely gas station to fill up. Scully pumps gas while Mulder grabs snacks. Once the tank is full she gives Mulder the little wave that he can pay now before she turns away from the building to take in her surroundings. As far as she can tell they’re in more or less the middle of nowhere, everything is flat and pretty much void of signs of civilization. The last sunlight of the day is pleasantly warm on her face and she closes her eyes to savour it for a moment.

When she opens her eyes Mulder is beside her watching her with interest. She doesn’t bother to tell herself that she doesn’t notice that the golden light agrees with him. He looks radiant and when she smiles softly at him he smiles back and yes, this is an image of Mulder she is going to carefully tuck away in the back of her mind for safe keeping.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” she asks as she turns back to admire the orange and pink sky.

“Yes,” he agrees, his focus still on her. He leans up against the car beside her and together they watch the sun dip below the horizon. 

——

“Can we pull over?” Scully asks with practised calm. He complies immediately, already concerned because she never asks this, and the car kicks up dust as it slows to a stop on the rural road. The moment they’ve stopped her door is open and she bolts from the car. He shuts off the engine, grabs the water bottle from the cup holder and races after her.

When he reaches her she is kneeling in the grass dry heaving.

Mulder is silent but steady at her side and she does not flinch away from his hand on her shoulder. She makes a self-deprecating joke between retches and he can’t muster the strength to smile weakly (she’s not looking at him anyhow) so he squeezes her shoulder in response.

When she stops vomiting he offers her the water bottle he took from the car. It’s warm from sitting in that cup holder for hours but she accepts it gratefully. After a couple sips of water she stands and leans against him and together they take a few steps away from the grass.

“I’m…” She starts the sentence like she’s going to apologize, and Mulder is so ready to assure her that she has absolutely nothing to be sorry for that it takes him a moment to hear what she actually says.

“Sick,” she finishes as she takes a shaky breath, “I’m sick Mulder.”

All the air in his lungs seems to constrict. They haven’t been saying this out loud. Usually she tells him she’s fine and he lets her because that’s what lets her feel like things are okay most of the time.

And now her nose is bleeding and he can’t find the words to tell her so he steps in and she moves to meet him and they hug for a long while. 

When she steps away there’s blood on his white shirt. When she sees it she wipes at her nose and starts to apologize and he stops her with a gentle “Don’t.”

She’s still a little unsteady on her feet and he wants to make sure she knows that he’s in no hurry to get them back on the road so he takes off his jacket and arranges it in the dirt beside the car. He sits down first, then offers his hand out for her to join him. She grasps his outstretched hand and sits down beside him. She takes small sips of water and tilts her head back to rest on the car. A flock of birds flies overhead.

She doesn’t let go of his hand.

——

It feels strange to Mulder that he has almost no photographic evidence of their time together. He’s painfully aware that outside parties no doubt have countless surveillance photographs of them together, though he tries not to dwell on that. They’ve been working together for years and he has a single picture of them together. It was taken at an FBI holiday party which they reluctantly attended and even more reluctantly allowed the photo to be taken when someone with a camera had cornered them. Neither of them looks overly happy, both of them a little out of their element, immortalized under the unforgiving fluorescent lights in the hall as they were trying to leave. They both look impossibly young, he muses, but her especially. This picture was taken before the X-Files were shut down and reopened, before she was abducted, before they had saved each other a dozen times over, before cancer, before countless flights across the country, before hundreds of discussions in their office, before almost everything that made them who they are now. 

He hastily shoves the photo back in the desk when he hears her open their office door.

——

Mulder rushes down the hallway with a bag full of laundry, trying to catch the elevator before the doors close completely. His neighbour, the one who never much cared for him, clearly sees him and even goes as far as to do the whole ‘oh I’m reaching for the hold door open button but it was too late’ charade as the doors close in front of him. Mulder sighs and jabs at the down button until the light comes on, and then he presses it a couple more times for good measure. 

He doesn’t mean to dwell on what happened in this hallway, and for the most part he doesn’t. So in an alternate universe where that bee didn’t sting Scully, they kissed here. So what. For all he knows nothing would be different. Maybe it wasn’t that significant and that timeline has already folded itself back into the one he calls home. But here in the hall waiting for the elevator with his laundry he can’t help but glance back at the place where that alternate universe fractured away from the one he stands in now.

The hallway still feels haunted by potential, like it remembers them exactly as they were at their most vulnerable, when their boundaries had blurred away into oblivion thanks to a combination of exhaustion and despair and fear and the surge of unspoken things being said suddenly, finally. This potential shimmers like a mirage in the distance, like the illusion of water on the road on those dry sunny days. A tangible almost.

Because maybe in this timeline he and Scully can just go back to their version of normal, back to their office, back to the X-Files, back to mostly not talking about whatever it is that draws them ever closer together, but this stupid hallway will forever hold them accountable to that moment of collapse and near collision. 

He doesn’t remember what happened in this hall linearly. He remembers the ground being taken from under him when she said she was leaving. He remembers following her out into the hall like his life depended on it. He doesn’t remember exactly what he said or how he said it, but he remembers how desperately he meant it. His memory of that part of their encounter is overrun by the panic he felt, by the way her eyes filled with tears as he spoke, by the way her lips felt against his forehead…

He remembers how quickly things had shifted between them when their familiar patterns, the ones that had them always getting closer but never quite intersecting, suddenly didn’t apply.

They had existed, for the briefest of windows, completely outside of everything that held them in place. They were everything that made them who they are, but without the boundaries defined by their office and their jobs. They were limitless potential in liminal space with nothing holding them back, just two stars collapsing together, the pull of gravity between them finally more powerful than everything else in the cosmos.

Reality came crashing back in the form of a bee, the universe itself stepping in when it was clear nothing else was going to. He wonders sometimes about universal constants and if that’s what he and Scully are. Because he doesn’t believe in fate, but he believes in the necessity of the two of them facing the world together. 

The elevator doors open and he steps into it gratefully, already looking forward to going for a long run as soon as he gets his laundry started. 

——

They’re going to see the Lone Gunmen and he’s driving. They listen to the traffic on the local station for a couple minutes to confirm what they both know already (it sucks) before she presses one of the preset buttons and he nods with approval. Today’s selection is probably his favourite of the Scully stations.

They don’t even spend that much time in his car together. Commuting to the airport sometimes, the occasional trip to wherever the case is leading them that day if it’s within driving distance. Most of their time in cars together is spent in rentals in zip codes where they have to scan the radio for something other than static that they can agree upon. Regardless, in his car, for almost as long as he can remember knowing her, buttons 2, 3 and 6 belong to Scully.

——

Their first car ride together of the new millennium is different only in how much they are smiling. Mulder keeps looking over at her grinning, unable to contain himself. She keeps telling him to keep his eyes on the road but she’s smiling too.

——

They do not enter her apartment gracefully. She fumbles to unlock the door as they kiss, but she keeps getting distracted by everything about the way Mulder is pulling her closer. She’s feeling overwhelmed in the best way but at some point they need to actually get inside to make good on all the promises their bodies are making so she steps further into him, consuming his space completely as she shoves him firmly against the door.

This knocks Mulder out of orbit and she thoroughly enjoys the way he looks down at her, all desire and delight, as he surrenders to her touch completely. She drags her hand roughly through his hair and then down his chest as she wordlessly commands him to hold still and she feels his knees weaken enough for him to slide down the door a few inches in response. She bites her lip and finds herself looking forward to mutually exploring the pleasure he gets from obeying her with the time and care it deserves.

Mulder is very much not paying attention to her ongoing efforts to unlock the door, so when the door swings open behind him he stumbles backwards through it with a squawk.

She staggers after him as she giggles and he’s chuckling and as soon as the door closes behind them they’re kissing again, laughing against each other as he presses her up against the door. She’s got one of her hands gripped tightly in his shirt and the other in his hair, taking great pleasure in messing it up further and he’s still looking at her as if he’s expecting to wake up. She grinds against him and he whimpers in a way that he pretends isn’t pathetic as she murmurs her amusement in his ear.

——

It’s late when they finally return to his apartment. The evening hush has long since overtaken the building and they ride the elevator up to his floor in comfortable silence.

She stops walking halfway down the hall to his apartment and reaches out for his hand. He stops when he feels her hold him back, drawing him into where she is waiting for him. 

She’s standing right in that spot and he’s standing there too and his mind is a rush of blurry but vivid understanding that he needs to express. 

He struggles to grasp what still lingers in this hallway with them. He needs her to know that all of that potential is still here. That they are still limitless. Still a universal constant. Still here.

But she is already swaying ever so slightly, mirroring the way he is shifting his weight where he stands as she squeezes his hand. She is already looking up at him like together they are a perfectly balanced cosmic equation, and when he smiles she is already pulling him into a kiss.

Of course she already knows.

Of course.


End file.
